Archive Articles
256 Items
EC
Articles
Eyal Weizman and Architecture as Political Intervention
Yesomi Umolu
Sep 2012
Interested in a subjective, confrontational approach to architecture, Israeli writer-architect Eyal Weizman seeks to expand discourse in his field and put it in dialogue with disciplines like military strategy, forensics, and humanitarian law. In advance of his October 3 lecture, the Walker’s Yesomi Umolu caught up with Weizman to discuss his ideas on confronting politics through architecture.
FV
Articles
Natalia Almada’s Borderlands: Life, Death, and Mexico’s Drug War
Jeremy Meckler
Sep 2012
Fifty thousand people or more have been killed in Mexico’s drug war since 2006. But in her new documentary, El Velador, Natalia Almada addresses the death without depicting it: focusing on the quiet work of a night watchman in the cemetery where some of the Sinaloa drug cartel’s most notorious members are laid to rest, the violence has already happened, or it’s about to.
VA
Articles
Orbital Geography: Trevor Paglen’s Cave Painting for Space
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2012
If all goes as planned, the communications satellite EchoStar XVI will launch from Kazakhstan in October and reach a final orbit some 24,000 miles above the equator. On board will be a disk etched with 100 images from Earth, left for future civilizations to discover and decode. In a new interview, Trevor Paglen discusses these “last pictures,” which he dubs a “cave painting from the 21st century.”
EC
Articles
Which Commons: Market, Zoo, or Tribe?
Jon Ippolito
Sep 2012
“The question is not whether a museum should be a commons, but which model of the commons it should be,” says artists and new media professor Jon Ippolito, who looks at two models he considers highly compromised—the market and the zoo—as well as one he believes is closest to the original spirit of the commons—the tribe.
VA
Articles
JoAnn Verburg on Newspapers as Portals to the Political
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2012
JoAnn Verburg has featured newspapers in her photos since 1990, piercing idyllic scenes of her napping or lounging husband with news about poverty, war, and—in a work on view in the exhibition The Living Years—the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a new interview, Verburg discusses how she sees the newspapers as portals into the political, reminding us of the myriad realities coexisting in the world.
FV
Articles
The Story of Film: Mark Cousins’ Cinematic Odyssey Around the World (Twice)
Peter Schilling Jr.
Sep 2012
As subtitles go, filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, an expansive yet intimate 15-hour documentary about the history of movies, gets it right: An Odyssey. Created over the course of more than a decade, his filmic journey took him around the world, twice, as he set out to interview leading personalities and capture footage from global cinema’s vibrant past and present.
PA
Articles
Dance, Senses, and Distrust of the Body
Miguel Gutierrez as told to Michèle Steinwald
Sep 2012
Distrust of the body, says firebrand dancemaker Miguel Gutierrez, is part of the reason why dance is sometimes perceived as a second-class art form: “There’s an idea that to go into an exploration of the body is this indulgent, non-rational thing.” In a recent conversation, he discusses dance, the senses, the mind/body split, and his new performance, And lose the name of action.
EC
Articles
An Authentic Commons Is Not a Temporary Affair
Sarah Schultz & Sarah Peters
Sep 2012
Rick Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a vast collection of advertising, educational, and amateur films
available for public use. A writer, filmmaker, and longtime advocate for the public domain, Prelinger discusse the Walker’s Open Field initiative, the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice.
VA
Articles
What Can Saddam Teach Us About Democracy?
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2012
Paul Chan is fully aware how strange it might seem to publish a book on Saddam Hussein’s 1970s speeches about democracy. But as an artist and publisher, Chan found the publication of On Democracy by Saddam Hussein “perversely pleasurable,” “profoundly confusing,” and particularly instructive on the eve of a US presidential election.